Customers are increasingly demanding personal control over the products they purchase. For example, for many years computer retailers have provided consumers with the ability to specify the precise components of the computers they wish to purchase. In response to a particular customer's custom order, the retailer manufactures a single computer having the components specified by the customer, and then ships the custom-built computer to the consumer. This is an early example of what has now come to be known as “mass customization”—the manufacture and sale of highly-customizable mass-produced products, in quantities as small as one. Mass customization is now spreading to a wider and wider variety of products.
Purchasers of computers are primarily interested in the internal functionality of the computers they purchase, not their external appearance. Therefore, it is relatively unimportant for a purchaser of a computer to see what a customized computer will look like before completing the purchase.
This is not true, however, for many other products, such as jewelry, for which aesthetics are a primary component of the consumer's purchasing decision. Traditionally, product catalogs and web sites have been able to provide consumers with high-quality images of products offered because such products have not been customizable. Therefore, traditionally it has been sufficient to provide consumers with a single image of a non-customizable product before purchase. Even when products have been customizable, they have not been highly customizable. For example, in some cases it has been possible to select the product's color from among a small selection of offered colors. In this case, traditional catalogs and web sites might either display a single image of a product, alongside a palette of colors, or instead display separate images of the product, one in each color.
Such techniques may be sufficient for non-customizable products or for products with very limited customizability. Such techniques are not, however, sufficient to convey to the consumer an accurate understanding of the appearance of a highly customizable product before the consumer finalizes the purchase decision. If the final appearance of the product is particularly important to the consumer, this inability to view an accurate representation of the final product, reflecting all customizations, may make the consumer unwilling to purchase such a product.
Although one way to enable the consumer to view customized versions of a product for evaluation before purchase is to provide the consumer's computer with software for rendering any possible customized version of the product, doing so using existing techniques would require equipping each consumer's computer with powerful CAD software which is capable of producing realistic two-dimensional renderings of the product based on a three-dimensional CAD model. Few, if any, consumers would be willing to incur this cost and expense.
What is needed, therefore, are improved techniques for quickly generating and displaying a wide range of high-quality images of highly-customizable products.